Alakazam opened his eyes. Before I even had time to feel embarrassed about him seeing me in such a compromising position, the air had been sucked from my lungs and water droplets in the air began to vibrate. The light at the center of our pocket space grew bright and my mind stretched thin until John was ripped out of my arms.

When I next opened my eyes I was curled up in the dirt. I looked up against the backdrop of the trees and saw Carlos. He hovered over me and dropped my pants and phone right next to my head before walking away again.

I sat up and found my clothes in a messy pile so I dressed and scanned the forest for John. He wasn't too far away, still lying naked and unconscious on a bed of pine needles and tree bark.

"John," I said softly. Carlos snuck up behind me and dropped a pile of his clothes on the ground. "I remember what happened now," I said.

Carlos stared at me for a moment then whacked me on the head with one of his spoons and teleported away.

"Ow, what the hell was that for?" He was already gone by the time I could say anything. "And why do you still have those spoons?" I mumbled in a softer voice.

Maybe the distortion messed with my memory before, but now that we were out I did remember the split seconds between the Hyper Beam and falling unconscious. I was standing there as scared as Faraday when…

"Oh shit, Faraday!" I looked around and kept shouting his name but I couldn't find him.

"Liz?" John blinked and wiped his eyes.

"Put your clothes on, we have to find him."

We spent hours searching the forest. John also remembered what happened. Just as Gyarados fired a Hyper Beam, Carlos teleported between us and it. He put up some kind of dark field that deflected the Hyper Beam away from us but soon the field grew and engulfed us. I couldn't remember if Faraday was caught in the distortion, but John said he saw Faraday run away before we were blasted. Either way, that little guy had to be somewhere in that forest.

Other than that John didn't say much. I joked a bit about us having sex but he didn't respond. I suppose I didn't quite know what to think of it either so we mostly yelled for Faraday. He never showed up. Though I guess we're lucky Nidoking didn't either.

Eventually John convinced me to go back home.

"Maybe Faraday went to one of our friends," he said. "Ran back to see Blaine and Squirtle?"

So we went to see Blaine. Just as we knocked on the door I heard an unmistakable "Pika" from through the door.

"Faraday?"

Blaine opened the door and Faraday stood next to him on the ground. "There you are you little bastard." I picked him up and hugged him. "We spent hours looking for you."

I turned to smile at John. He only looked at Blaine. "Hey Blaine. What's up with that face?"

Blaine stuttered for a moment. "Where were you?"

John pointed at me. "This one got us stuck in a spatial distortion for a while."

"Why you pointing at me?" I shifted Faraday to my other arm. "You were the one going on about finding Mew in the magical forest of mystery."

"Well it was your buddy Alakazam that made the distortion."

"Oh, I apologize, he really shouldn't have saved our lives like that."

"Chill out, I'm just joking around." He didn't smile.

Blaine threw his arms in the air. "You two were gone for months."

Faraday looked up at me with large teary eyes. We had only been in there a few hours. Maybe overnight? Not more than a day. "What do you mean months?"

Blaine approached me and stroked Faraday's head. "The night you guys disappeared Faraday came to me scared and shaking. I tried to pick him up but he kept shocking me so I just let him in and he sat in the corner crying. I tried calling you but you never answered so I let him stay with me and eventually he calmed down but you guys never came back. It's been months. We filed a police report, there was a search, Anna even came back up here for a while, but it's been so long that we thought you were both dead."

I pulled out my phone, but it had run out of charge. "What, you think I'm stupid? Where's a charger?"

Blaine wordlessly fetched me one and when my phone started up it was flooded with notifications. Calls from Blaine and Anna and the police and the foster home, and countless messages from people I'd barely known, and flagged alerts for news articles featuring my name that led to investigations into the suspicious ongoings of the Cinnabar Forest.

"I don't understand. It was only a few hours. A day or two at most."

Blaine scratched his head and John reached for the charger to check his own phone.

Faraday shivered and an explanation formed in my head. We were trapped in a spatial distortion. Time passes differently in curved space. We thought it would be slower and we'd emerge from it fractions of a second later to the rest of a Hyper Beam, but that's not how it worked. We went faster. Hours for us were months for the rest of the world.

I glanced over at John's phone for the time. He was reading messages from Sophie. Today was the middle of first quarter, second year.

"I've gotta find Sophie." John turned toward the door.

"Wait, John." Blaine followed and I went after them both.

On our way to Sophie's I told Blaine what happened, how we went searching for Mew and found the phone in the forest and ran into the Nidorino and Nidoking and Gyarados and of course the spatial distortion. He remained skeptical on most accounts.

"John?" Sophie's eyes watered up when we arrived at her door. She leapt into his arms and kissed him. Then she took one glance at me. "Where have you two been?" She looked intently at John. "Were you with her this whole time?"

And so we told our story again, and they told us what we had missed. Slowly a picture came together. John and I made calls. People rejoiced in our return and then questioned our outlandish story. I'd been kicked out of my apartment. My stuff had been put into university storage. Same with John.

There was more bad news on the school front. On the one hand I was far enough ahead in classes at the start of last quarter to pass them, some just barely. But I wasn't around to register for second year classes. I lost my scholarship, a new undergrad filled my position in Alcubierre's lab, and even if I managed to start taking classes again I couldn't start until the beginning of next year according to university policy.

I couldn't even get to my stuff on account of some lengthy paperwork process for students back from unexpected leave. That night I slept in Blaine's room. He gave me a pair of pajamas and insisted I take the bed.

I eventually drifted into an uneasy sleep, Faraday in my arms, with my phone and Carlos' key as my only remaining possessions. I dreamt of being a Pikachu.

"Faraday! Shock him!"

I closed my eyes and felt charge rush out of my body. I opened them and saw myself. Liz and John in front of the Gyarados. Alakazam teleported in and they disappeared into a small point.

Gyarados swayed. Its eyelids grew heavy. Nidoking roared. Gyarados fell to the ground, spraying white water and sand into the rainy sky. That's when I headed into the forest.

I ran until I couldn't hear Nidoking and then I kept running. I came to a large metallic hatch in the ground. There was a window, but it was too dark to see anything down there.

"Hey Liz."

I looked up and the girl with blue hair stood next to me. "Hey Sarah."

We sat next to each other on a nearby bench and looked at the flickering baseball lights in the distance. She handed me a blue banana.

"Rough day?" she asked me.

I nodded. "Lost my keys. Late to class. Feet are kinda sore too."

Eevee jumped into my lap.

Sarah curled strands of her hair over her ear. "I miss you. Haven't seen you in a while. We should hang out sometime."

I smiled. "Yeah we should."

Lightning flashed and in front of us Zapdos descended from the sky, landing on the roof of an aging steel barn frame. It shot a bolt of lightning our way.

In the morning Faraday didn't want to get out of bed so we lounged there for another hour or two, unsure what exactly to do with ourselves. I might have lain there all day if I didn't decide to call Sarah.

"Sarah? Hey, it's Liz."

"Liz? Oh my god I heard you were back. How are you?"

I chuckled. "Not bad. Kind of exhausted from explaining what happened to everyone that asks."

I heard her laugh. "I can imagine, I heard the story. Stuck in a spatial distortion, huh? Sounds wild."

"Yeah. Pretty wild. So uh, I didn't really have a reason for calling, just wanted to say hi and all."

"Yeah, I'm so glad to hear you're okay. Actually you have great timing, I'm in Cinnabar right now. You wanna meet for lunch or something?"

So just like that I had a fairly compelling reason to get out of bed. Without access to my wardrobe I had to wear the same clothes from our forest trek, but at least I had a chance to wash them overnight.

We decided to meet at Café Descartes, some fancy place with shiny crystal glasses and cloth napkins folded in an odd polygonal shape. A Psyduck maybe? I don't know.

I'd forgotten that it was only a few buildings down from Porter's, the place where Luigi was crushed by a Gyarados. While we waited for Sarah, Faraday played with the ice cubes in my glass. I watched the construction workers as they continued removing tools from the site of the new building.

"Pika!" He'd finally spilled the glass all over the table, startling me with both a shock of electricity and a spray of cold water on my lap.

I refrained from yelling at him. Instead I quietly brushed ice cubes off my legs. "I told you to be careful," I said, my tone a bit more motherly than I'd like.

He backed away from the spill, looked down at it and then back at me as if expecting me to do something about it.

"Yeah yeah, I'll clean up your mess." I stood up and unfolded one of the possibly-psyduck heads to mop up the water.

"Hey there."

I twirled around and saw Sarah waving at me with a smile. "Oh hey Sarah. Sorry for my appearance, I've been wearing the same thing for months and then Faraday decided I was too dry."

She laughed. "Don't worry, I've looked much worse on hikes with this one." She pointed at Eevee.

Sarah wore black flip flops, short blue shorts and a dark purple long-sleeved V-neck that contrasted with the long light blue strands of hair cascading around her on all sides.

We both sat down.

"So... you must be having an interesting day." She made this half smirk as if she intended to apologize to me.

I smiled. "Yeah, up until now its basically been shit."

She reached for the menu. "Then I know what we're going to order. You're gonna love this crepe. Well, I don't know, maybe you don't like crepes." She paused a moment to gauge my reaction. "But I love it, so... you know, we're gonna get it." She winked at me.

"I guess you're the boss."

She smiled back. "Oh hey, it's a porygon."

"A what?"

"Pika!" Faraday jumped onto the table to sniff the folded napkin that Sarah had just noticed and Eevee jumped into my lap.

Sarah held it up. "Yeah, I guess that's one of the things you missed while away." She set down the napkin and pulled out her phone to show me a picture of this pink and blue polygonal creature. "After the whole thing with magnemite being created in a lab people got interested in creating artificial mons. This one's supposed to interface with computers."

"Artificial mons? What else have I missed?"

"On that front?" she asked. "I think researchers in Hoenn are planning on designing a sentient supercomputer."

I chuckled. "No, I just mean in general. What are you doing in Cinnabar anyway?" Eevee pawed for my attention.

"Interviewing. I've been looking for a job. Don't think they're gonna call me back though."

I nodded. "Too bad."

She brightened up. "But I do have a good feeling about another one. It's with the Aura company. Something having to do with promoting human and mon relations? I mean I'd love to just keep with the fight club back in Viridian but my dad wants me to get out of the house and make money of my own, so... here I am."

My misfortune settled again into my stomach. There was a job hunt in my future as well. "Aura huh? What do they do anyway?"

Her eyes drifted away from me. Her lips closed and she pushed Faraday away from licking her face to get a better look at something behind me.

"What's up?" I turned around and saw a man in a blue pin-striped suit and tan overcoat enter a nearby grocery store. "You know him?"

She shrugged. "I guess that's another thing you missed. Apparently he's been asking around about a redhead girl from Viridian that went missing around the same time you did."

"Why's he looking here?"

"Don't know, but he seems pretty certain she's here." She looked back down at the menu and started twisting her fingers in her hair.

"What is it?" I asked.

She looked back up at me. "Well it's just a rumor."

I snickered. "I love a good rumor." The public imagination has always been a rich source of entertainment.

Sarah curled loose strands of hair over her ear and leaned in. "Now it's obviously just gossip. I don't believe it, but you'll probably hear it from other people anyway."

"That's cute."

She gave me an inquisitive look. "What do you mean?"

"You want me to think you don't believe this scandalous gossip, but whatever it is you think it might true. It's written all over your face." I stuck out my tongue at her.

She smiled and rolled her eyes. "No I don't. It's impossible."

"Well what is it?"

"He's supposed to be a psychic."

I widened my eyes as much as I could and stretched my mouth into an awestruck 'O' "No way."

When she couldn't contain herself anymore we both broke out in laughter at the absurdity of it.